


Act V

by tothewillofthepeople



Series: what love can do that dares love attempt [2]
Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Adult Losers Club (IT), Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, First Kiss, Fix-It, Fluff, Getting Together, M/M, Post-IT Chapter Two (2019), References to Shakespeare
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-02
Updated: 2021-03-02
Packaged: 2021-03-15 06:13:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29804124
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tothewillofthepeople/pseuds/tothewillofthepeople
Summary: One week into living out of his suitcase in a hotel near his office, Richie had offered to have him out in California. It was a breezy invitation, no strings attached, as long as Eddie wanted.Come to California, baby. Don’t you miss me already?
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Series: what love can do that dares love attempt [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2190717
Comments: 5
Kudos: 95





	Act V

**Author's Note:**

> i felt like R + E deserved a sequel. maybe read that one first.

“Did Myra like theater?”

“What?”

Eddie has to pull his head out of a box and his mind out of a memory from fifteen years previous for the question to really settle. He squints across Richie’s sun-drenched living room to where the man himself is engrossed in a different box.

The apartment gets a full face of light for most hours of the day, which had been one of the first bargaining chips Richie used when he pitched the idea of having Eddie come live with him. _California, baby,_ he’d said over the phone. _The only thing brighter than the stars is the sun._ His Voice had been that of an old silver screen actor, pitch perfect.

Eddie likes the light. In it, Richie’s hair just shines.

“All these playbills,” Richie says, holding up one to illustrate. _Hamlet_ at the Broadhurst Theatre, 2009. Jude Law in the titular role. Eddie had taken the train straight from work, gotten a criminally wilted salad at some trendy bistro, and walked into the theater alone. Excellent production. Marvelous stagecraft. Eddie had to bite down on the palm of his hand to keep from crying like a child.

“No,” he says, finally answering Richie’s question. He sets the papers in his own hands—tax returns—back in the box. “No, those are mine.”

“All of them?” Richie’s eyebrows are up now, interested as he flips through the playbills and programs. _Uncle Vanya_ at the Brooks Atkinson Theater, 2000. _The Tempest_ from 1995—the year Eddie moved to New York City for undergrad. _August: Osage County_ from 2007, which he’d actually hated quite a lot. _Richard III_ at the Belasco, 2013. There’s more Shakespeare than anything else in the pile, but it is quite a pile. More straight plays than musicals—he didn’t care for musicals, generally. 

“Yeah,” Eddie says. “I used to go a lot.”

“Used to?” Richie waves around the playbill for _Indecent,_ 2017\. Eddie had walked out of the Cort theater feeling like his heart was melting out of his chest. He was months away from finding his friends. He’d had no idea, of course. “This is from this year.”

“Up until recently,” Eddie says impatiently. “Yeah, I went a lot.”

Richie smiles at him across the room. He’s done almost nothing but smile ever since Eddie arrived a week ago, jetlagged and irritable off a four-hour plane ride. The movers had faced a delay with bringing the last of his boxes from New York, but everything is finally in the same place. All Eddie has to do now is unpack.

So far it has taken more out of him than he expected it would.

Going through the boxes is like open heart surgery, actually, with Eddie as both patient and surgeon. Does that make Richie the nurse? The metaphor is already out of hand. But Eddie feels peeled open, vulnerable, bleeding. The facts of his life strewn across Richie’s floor, adding up to almost nothing.

Suits for a job he’d also hated. The watch Myra got him for their tenth anniversary, which he wore out of husbandly obligation even though he despised the way it sat on his wrist. Cheap paperback novels, the kind sold in airport kiosks, that he bought whenever he flew so he would have a distraction.

The one thing he’s glad to have is a good set of steak knives, which he never fucking used but which Richie is very enthusiastic about.

And the playbills, he supposes. He’s glad to have those too.

“This one is signed,” Richie notes.

Eddie wrinkles his nose. “Stage door was always a nightmare,” he mutters. “I only did it a couple times.”

“Gosh, and I thought you would be impressed by movie stars,” Richie says, grinning. He sets the playbills in a tidy stack. “Didn’t know you preferred your actors in the flesh.”

“Don’t say it like that,” Eddie says. He throws a stress ball at Richie’s head and hits his shoulder instead; Richie laughs at him, delighted, and whips it back.

He finds a place for the folder of tax returns, eventually. Richie’s guest room which was supposed to be Eddie’s room but which is now really Eddie’s office has a nice desk in it, courtesy of a flea market trip once Eddie realized the apartment didn’t have any great places from which to work. He’s remote while he ties up loose strings with his office back in New York. The time difference only screws with him a little. He’s an early riser anyway; he only regrets the way it makes Richie grumble when Eddie slips out of bed in the blue mornings. 

The tax returns have their place. Eddie gets rid of some of his suits and hangs the rest on the right side of Richie’s closet. His favorite mug goes in the cupboard, austere next to all the novelty mugs that Richie favors. Their books line the shelves together.

The playbills stay in the box, but only at first.

“Do you have a favorite?” Richie asks, one night as they’re sitting down to dinner (sushi, which is new territory for Eddie). 

Eddie doesn’t look up as he mixes wasabi into his soy sauce. “Hm?”

“All those plays you saw,” Richie elaborates, around a mouthful of shrimp tempura. “Did you have a favorite?”

Eddie blinks. “Oh. I’m not sure.”

He knows his answer, of course. A business trip to the UK in 2009. He’d extended his visit by one extra night, unexpectedly, to go see a play at Shakespeare’s Globe. _Romeo and Juliet._ At the time it wrecked him and he never knew why—Shakespeare always did, of course, and he’d maybe chalked it up to the experience of being in the historical theater, in the playwright’s own country. 

But now he remembers an acerbic, impulsive Mercutio, whose jokes went too far, whose gaiety had an equally sharp edge of melancholy. A Mercutio who spent the whole production looking—furiously, longingly—at Romeo.

_Good god,_ Eddie thinks to himself. _I had the memory buried in me the whole time._

_“Macbeth_ is always really good,” he says out loud, deflecting.

Richie gasps and leans back in his chair with his hand over his heart. “Don’t say the name!”

“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” Eddie says, primly. And then, “Why?”

“Why what?”

“Chew and swallow, jackass. Why were you asking about the plays?”

Richie makes a huge production of getting the food in his mouth down his gullet before he answers. “I thought we could frame a couple of ‘em, if you wanted. Put them on the walls.”

Eddie resettles his grip on the chopsticks. He’s useless with them, but it’s the principle of the thing. “Oh.” He can’t think of what else to say. “Do you want that?”

“Do _you?”_ Richie counters. “They’re yours.”

“But this apartment is yours,” Eddie says, blank. He flushes when Richie gives him a Look. It’s a very loaded Look. It’s a Look that says, _We have not fully talked about what’s going on here, but you and I both know that we are not simply two heterosexual friends temporarily sharing an apartment._

That sort of Look.

“It was just an idea,” Richie says, finally turning his gaze back down to his food. “We don’t have to.”

“No, I like it,” Eddie says, because he really does. “I’ll try to pick some out that might look nice.”

Richie smiles. Eyes crinkled up, soy sauce on the corner of his mouth. Eddie reaches for the egg rolls so he won’t do anything stupid, like launch himself across the table for a kiss.

No, they haven’t talked about it.

Eddie had walked out of Derry with a chest wound healing supernaturally fast and a crisis both professional, emotional, and sexual raging in his head. To the tune of his own heartbeat he carefully exploded every piece of his life. He quit his job. He divorced Myra. He bought and ate a hot dog from a street vendor, and it didn’t kill him, and he laughed all the way down 5th Avenue.

One week into living out of his suitcase in a hotel near his office, Richie had offered to have him out in California. It was a breezy invitation, no strings attached, as long as Eddie wanted. _Come to California, baby. Don’t you miss me already?_

Eddie had gotten on a plane the next day. He slept on the couch for one night before bitching his way into Richie’s bed, claiming back aches, claiming nightmares. Both of those things were true. But the truer thing was the low-flame desire in the pit of his stomach to be as close to Richie as possible, at all times.

These days they wake up often with their hands and legs and feet tangled together. They never shy away.

“Do you remember that summer?” Eddie asks, later, on the weekend. He has the box of playbills open at his feet. _Spring Awakening, Othello, The Beauty Queen of Leenane._

Richie is opening an orange with his large hands at the kitchen counter. He gives Eddie an odd look over one shoulder. “Murder clown summer?” he asks. “Is this a memory check?”

“No,” Eddie says. He holds up a program: _Romeo and Juliet,_ starring Orlando Bloom. Eddie hadn’t liked the anachronisms much. “The next summer. Shakespeare. Do you remember?”

“Oh! Of course I do.” Richie brings the peeled orange over to the couch and gives a segment to Eddie easily. An unthinking gesture. Sweet. Eddie looks at the little bit of fruit in his hand, utterly derailed for a moment. But Richie is still talking. “They put all of us in tights. Honestly indecent, considering the size of the schlong I was hauling around.”

Eddie elbows him in the ribs and eats his orange segment. “You’re a disgrace,” he says. Juice runs down his chin; Richie reaches out to swipe it away with his thumb, and they eye each other warily. “Is that all you remember?”

“I remember you being a little bitch to Connor Bowers all the time,” Richie says, and then laughs at the way Eddie bristles.

“He annoyed me,” he mutters. “Always tagging around after you, wanting to run lines, wanting extra sword practice…”

“Eddie, baby, were you jealous?” Richie asks, delighted. “You could have practiced with my sword any time you wanted.”

_"Don’t,”_ Eddie says, “don’t even joke about it, you stupid fucker, you always make it a joke,” but he can’t stop smiling even as he fits his palm to the side of Richie’s head and shoves him away. Richie just rocks back against him, still laughing.

They sit in companiable silence for a while, Richie on his phone, Eddie sifting through playbills. He can’t decide if he wants to pick his true favorites, or go by pure aesthetics and frame the ones that would look nicest on the wall. He frowns down at _The Book of Mormon_ (god, Richie would probably love that, wouldn’t he) and considers.

“I cried every night,” Richie says, out of nowhere.

Eddie twists to look at him.

“That’s something else I remember.” Richie gives him a smile. A soft one. “I would watch your death scene from the wings. I always cried.”

“No you didn’t,” Eddie says, fast, reactive. “You’re making that up.”

“Cross my heart,” Richie says. And he does it, too. He makes an X across his broad chest with one finger. “That’s why I skipped bows on opening night.” Eddie dimly remembers that—the unexpected gap in their curtain call, Mercutio nowhere to be found. “I hid in the crossover hall and bawled my eyes out.”

_“Why?”_ Eddie asks. “It wasn’t—we weren’t nearly that good.”

“That’s a lie,” Richie says, and his smiler gets wider, showing off his teeth. “You were such a pretty little Romeo, don’t even deny it.”

“I _wasn’t,”_ Eddie protests again. He feels crazy. “I always felt so stupid. I felt like everyone could see right through me.”

“Eds, you were the best part of that production,” Richie says, very serious. “You and Bev. Fuck. I loved watching the two of you.” He gives a halfway smile. “Always wished it was me.”

“Why do you think I made you run lines with me, asshole?” Eddie asks. His face must be flaming red, but it’s worth it for the slow pleasure that unfurls across Richie’s expression.

“Aw,” Richie says, soft. He gives Eddie the last segment of the orange. Eddie bites down. Sun in his eyes, citrus on his tongue.

Nothing else happens.

Not that day, or in the days following. Their slow circling dance continues. Around and around the apartment, together in the mornings when they both wake up, together in the kitchen where Eddie makes coffee and Richie scrambles eggs, together in the evenings for takeout, together at night when they climb under the covers once more.

Eddie has a favorite pillow. Richie likes to read for a while, spy novels and fantasy, before turning out the lamp. They never start out touching, but they drift together in the night, two ships moored together. Floating.

It is, in fact, almost a full month before their last hesitation is dissolved. Eddie hangs three playbills in the hallway, and smiles every time he passes them. Richie swaggers up on a stage for the first time since Derry, and delivers a comeback show so blisteringly funny that it all but erases the disaster of his last public appearance. Ben and Beverly get engaged—something that makes both Richie and Eddie cry, even though they both swear they knew it was coming.

And Richie’s eyes follow Eddie in every room. And Eddie’s hands reach for Richie’s every night.

“Rich? What are these?”

When it happens, Richie is under the kitchen table, trying to tighten one of its legs with the wrong type of screwdriver. Eddie, on his quest to find the right one, had gone digging in the hall closet for the toolbox. What he found instead was a white envelope with a pair of tickets inside. 

“Gonna need you to be more specific, Eds,” Richie grunts. “Man, fuck a Phillips head.”

“Okay,” Eddie says. He comes to stand by the table. “What are these tickets that were hidden in the hall closet?”

There’s a comically loud _bump,_ and then Richie starts swearing. He crawls out from under the table with one hand pressed to the top of his head. His eyes are wide, almost wild. “It was supposed to be a surprise,” he says.

“These are tickets to the Globe,” Eddie says. His voice sounds strange to his own ears.

“Yeah,” Richie says. He gets to his feet, finally, swaying up to his full impressive height. His glasses have slid almost all the way down his nose; he pushes them up with his middle finger. “Uh, they’re doing _The Winter’s Tale._ I wanted to try for _Hamlet_ but it didn’t work with any of my show dates and also I thought we could rope Bill and Audra in since they’re wrapping up filming right around that time anyway—”

He’s talking fast, the way he does when he thinks he’s fucked up somehow. Eddie holds the slim paper tickets between his fingers and feels like an ocean, bound in a paper cup. “You were going to fly me to the Globe?” he asks. His voice comes out quiet.

“Yeah, I—yeah.” Richie swallows. “If you wanted.”

“I do want,” Eddie says. He looks down at the tickets. “I’ve never seen _The Winter’s Tale.”_

“It’s good,” Richie says. “I saw it in college. The theater group my roommate was in.”

“Yeah?” Eddie asks. He looks up. Richie’s eyes are so wide, so blue.

“Yeah,” Richie says. He clears his throat. “Messed me up pretty bad. Made me feel like I was missing something, only I had no idea what.”

“We were supposed to make codes,” Eddie says quietly. “So I wouldn’t forget you once I left.”

“Well, all I managed to get was heartburn any time I heard a line of iambic pentameter,” Richie says. His smile is hopeful. “Gonna go to the theater with me, then, Eds?”

“I’m not a cheap date,” Eddie warns him with a little laugh.

It startles a laugh out of Richie, too. “Oh, I already know that,” he teases, and his hands are warm where he settles them on either side of Eddie’s face. “If I thought you’d be contended with some local high school fumbling their way through _The Taming of the Shrew_ I would have taken you already.”

“Fuck that play, no high school should be performing that play,” Eddie mumbles, and the rest of what he wants to say gets lost when Richie kisses him.

It’s a good kiss. Jesus. Eddie makes a helpless little noise, and one of Richie’s hands sweeps back into his hair. They sway there together, slowly learning the shape of each other’s mouths. The tip of Eddie’s tongue. The sting of Richie’s teeth. Eddie sets the tickets down on the table, so they don’t get crumpled when he wraps his arms around Richie’s wide shoulders. 

And it’s nothing like he thought it would be, in the shameful small moments when he wondered how kissing Richie might feel. It’s nothing like the careful, impersonal stage kisses he shared with Bev as a teenager, or anything like the spectrum of kisses he received on dates or in marriage. Eddie’s head is all knit up in wordless sonnets, pure emotion. He wants this always.

“I want you to stay here with me,” Richie says, after some time, into the curve of Eddie’s neck. He presses a kiss with every word. “I don’t want you to ever leave.”

“I’m staying,” Eddie says. He can feel his heartbeat in his entire body. “I think every part of my life was trying to remind me of you.”

The rumble in Richie’s throat is pleased. “Come to bed with me,” he says, and Eddie does.

They fall asleep tangled together.

**Author's Note:**

> on tumblr as [kvothes](https://kvothes.tumblr.com/tagged/x) / clown twitter as [@nonbinaryrichie](https://twitter.com/nonbinaryrichie)


End file.
